


don’t let it hit you

by Prim_the_Amazing



Series: RVB Angst War [3]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Illustrated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 23:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14067459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: “Please have a word with Caboose,” Kimball says, and the bottom drops out of Carolina’s stomach. “He needs someone to talk to, even if he doesn’t agree.”Work is meant to distract. She can’t think of anything less distracting than Caboose right now.The dumbass is in that guy line’s of fire, take him out. He got lost on his way to the cafeteria again, lead him there. Count his pills to see if he took them, he’s a disaster.Caboose is indisposed, and it isn’t because of injuries.





	don’t let it hit you

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Carolina’s reaction to Church’s death~?

Church dies. He leaves her a video.

She doesn’t watch it.

 

They may have won the war, but there’s still work to do, and Carolina does it. When a snake’s head is cut off, the body still spasms, still struggles messily with no direction. She’ll stomp on it until it lies still.

Grif is in emergency care after the battle on the Staff of Charon, so she goes ahead and takes over his squad for the moment. People rarely say no to her, nowadays. Caboose is indisposed as well (but not due to injuries) so Wash takes charge of his squad. Simmons is hurt badly too, and so is most of his team due to poor luck. There’s few enough of them left that they’re just absorbed into Green Team. Tucker doesn’t so much as wink at them, starts barking orders the second the decision is made.

Tucker is not hurt enough to not be able to lead, to still fight. He is blazing, furious and determined, and there is dried blood that isn’t his flaking off his new aqua armor, stubbornly clinging on in the cracks of the plates. He can only seem to think about hurting Hargrove and his hired men, and nothing else.

Wash shoots him worried looks, but Carolina silently approves. Tucker’s going at this with the right approach. She doesn’t take off her armor either. She doesn’t bother wiping away blood that will only be replaced by more in a few hours again anyways either. She doesn’t sleep either. She doesn’t give her brain enough time to think to wait for a know it all little voice in the back of her head to speak up about velocity and mass or what an awkward dork she is. She doubts Tucker’s doing that too, but she does it.

Thinking becomes comfortably harder and harder to do, and she just relies on her muscle memory to mow her way through the remaining space pirates, the panicking last throes of the snake’s body.

She’s grown very reliant on Ch-- having an AI lately, but she’s still the best, and she’s adaptable. She adjusts quickly, and her kills go from sloppy and frantic to precise and smooth, each movement flowing into the next.

She snaps a woman’s neck, and the man behind her howls what she presumes her name was in despair. Carolina puts him out of his misery and doesn’t give herself time to think about this either. When there’s a fight, the past doesn’t matter. The future doesn’t matter either. Just the present, just the short term, just how hard she can hit and how fast she can run.

Eventually, something very bad happens. She runs out of enemies. They would have lasted longer if it was just her, but she isn’t the only one here who needs to distract themselves, who hates these people and what they’ve done and helped happen with a passion, who wants vengeance, who has a gun. She runs out, and she’s left standing in a field of bodies.

She stares blankly into the distance, trying to stop herself from thinking, from feeling, from reacting.

(This is what her father has taught her: grief is poison. It will tear you apart, diminish you, turn you into a shadow of your former self. Her personal experiences confirm this. Thinking of gold armor containing a rotting body, Tex’s bullet ripping through CT’s head, Maine gone, the twins gone, the AIs gone. Snarling and furious, pointing her gun at bumbling strangers to get them to obey her faster. _It doesn’t hurt if you don’t let it hit you._ She isn’t going to let it hit her again. She’s too good for that)

“H… help,” one of the bodies on the ground says. It’s wearing beige and maroon armor. Friendly.

Carolina starts carrying bodies back to base-- the living ones to Grey and her cadre of medics, the dead ones to where they’re still tallying up and identifying the dead. She uses her speed unit for the living ones, and she has to concentrate very hard to not fuck it up and break her legs or eat pavement because she isn’t an AI. It takes up so much concentration that she can’t think about anything else. She uses her speed unit for the corpses too, in the end, even though it isn’t necessary.

She runs herself ragged, and helping hands are needed too sorely for anyone to be able to bring themselves to try and tell her to stop, which is good because she wouldn’t have listened anyways. After a long while, she has to crouch down in a corner out of the way of everyone so her speed unit will have time to cool down. She hasn’t found anything but corpses for seven hours now, the living either dying or already found by now. It’s fine. She can take five. She’s too exhausted to think anyways.

She falls asleep in the corner of a noisy, bustling hallway, and everyone’s so busy or pained or ecstatic or grief stricken that she isn't even noticed. She sleeps deeply, and for a long time.

  


Her father had been in his office when she got home from school, and she knew not to disturb him when he was in there with his door closed. _Daddy’s working._

She made dinner for herself, and it wasn’t strange because her father got caught up in his work.

She went to bed without being told goodnight by him, and it wasn’t strange because he’d focus so intently on his formulas and theories that he wouldn’t go to bed until (her mother dragged him kicking and screaming) the numbers and letters would blur in front of his eyes.

She woke up and got ready for school, and he didn’t kiss her goodbye, and it was-- it was a little weird. Her father let his caffeine withdrawal wake him up almost a whole hour before Carolina had to leave, consistent as clockwork, and he’d have a lunch precisely calculated to be as healthy as possible ready for her by the time she came downstairs. They’d make breakfast together, their little slice of the day dedicated to the two of them. Mom wasn’t a morning person, often wasn’t home at all.

Had he overslept? Was he sick?

On her way to his bedroom, just to check, just to see if he was alright, she noticed that his office door was still closed. She slowed, stilled, looked at it. Pressed her ear up against the wood of the door.

Her mother’s voice, fainter than it should be even through the door, laughing and fond. Saying her father’s name.

A pause.

Her mother’s voice saying her father’s name again.

A pause.

Her mother’s voice, repeating her father’s name in the exact same tone and cadence. A recording.

A pause. He’s rewinding the video again.

He must miss her a lot, Carolina decides. She does too. Everything’s better when mom’s around. It’s a good thing it’s almost time for her to come back home.

 

(Her father never comes out of that room. The morning he gave her her optimally packed lunch and a kiss on her forehead, just like any other morning, was the last time she’d ever speak to him, ever be _seen_ by him, again. She hadn’t savored it. She hadn’t appreciated it. She had said _I love you too,_ but she hadn’t _thought_ about it. Hadn’t made sure that he knew that she meant it.

A man comes out of the office eventually, but it isn’t her father. It takes her too long to realize it.)

 

She wakes up with a sore body and an empty head. She raises her head and her shoulders and neck scream at her. She’s sitting with her knees up to her chest, and her arms wrapped loosely around her knees, leaning against the corner of a hallway.

She stares blankly at her surroundings, and then gives the back of her head a mental poke. _Refresh my memory?_

In the corner of her HUD, there’s an icon indicating that there’s an unplayed video waiting for her attention.

Her memory manages to refresh itself on its own, no help needed.

It’s like she’s been punched, and she inhales sharply, thinking _if you don’t let it hit you._

How is this fair? She hadn’t even known to remember to brace herself, to dodge. If only things were fair, nothing would ever hit her. She’s too good.

She stands up, and her stiff muscles all scream at her in a chorus. It’s good. Drowns out her thoughts a little. She moves and her body screams more. Walks. Runs. Arms pumping, large, bounding steps that make her feel like she’s been run over by a Warthog.

She hasn’t trained hard enough to feel this much satisfying pain at once in years. It feels like an achievement. It feels like a relapse.

It’s a distraction, which is what matters.

She finds Grey and says, “What can I do?”

The woman has the weight of hundreds upon thousands of wounded and dead and dying on her shoulders, so she points Carolina at some heavy boxes and equipment that need moving instead of saying so much as a word about overworking.

She moves them, and her body screams over any noise her head makes.

She finishes, and she runs, and she finds Kimball. “What can I do?”

“All of your other friends have tried,” she says. Kimball always looks exhausted. She has never looked more exhausted.

“I can do it,” she says confidently. She can’t perhaps do everything, but she can _force_ herself to do anything. Like shoving something through a hole that’s an incompatible shape. It’ll come through if you press hard enough, even if pieces will snap off in the process. It doesn’t matter if she breaks so long as the thing gets done.

She leaves an empty space in her thoughts, a moment of blank waiting for a hot and angry denial.

It doesn’t come. There isn’t going to be disagreement in her head after those kinds of thoughts in her head any longer. She grits her teeth until her jaw aches.

“Please have a word with Caboose,” Kimball says, and the bottom drops out of Carolina’s stomach. “He needs someone to talk to, even if he doesn’t agree.”

Work is meant to distract. She can’t think of anything less distracting than Caboose right now. _The dumbass is in that guy line’s of fire, take him out. He got lost on his way to the cafeteria again, lead him there. Count his pills to see if he took them, he’s a disaster._

Caboose is indisposed, and it isn’t because of injuries.

“Okay,” comes out of her mouth, because looking after Caboose is second nature by now, and following orders always has been. She grimaces at herself, but she’s wearing a helmet so it’s fine.

Nothing is fine.

She runs to Caboose’s room even though she wants to drag her feet. Her heartbeat thunders in her ears.

The door is closed. She slows, stills, looks at it.

Presses her ear against the metal of the door. Listens.

Church’s voice, soft and gentle, saying Caboose’s name.

A pause.

Church’s voice, the exact same cadence and tone.

(She had knocked on the office door eventually, had tentatively called out. But she knew he was still alive by the way the video rewinded, and she wasn’t supposed to disturb her father when he was working, and she didn’t know how to pick locks yet. Didn’t know what this was all about. She’d let him come out on his own time. The Director came out after over a week later, and her father never did. He’d been inside the same building as her, they’d been seperated by just a few inches of wood and a lock more formality than function.

He’d been dying such a short distance away from her, and she’d let him.)

Something almost like a scream rips out of her throat, a little too guttural to quite fit, and then she starts forcing the metal doors apart from each other with sheer force. Breaking the locking mechanism, making sparks fly, making black spots appear in her vision as she makes her sore muscles work. She can force herself to do anything.

She walks into the room, into a mess of clothes and stuffed animals and half disassembled or put together machinery.

There he is: not even looking at her, sitting on the floor, leaning against his bed, hunched over a datapad. The light of the screen lights up his face in blue, and the forced open door behind her casts Carolina’s shadow across the room in a square of yellowish light. The ceiling lights aren’t on.

_“Caboose, buddy--”_

A pause.

Grief is poison. This is how people die without dying.

“Stop it,” she says, and her voice sounds tense and ragged even though she can’t really feel her throat or her mouth.

Caboose doesn’t look away from the screen.

_“Caboose, buddy--”_

She’s known for a long time now that she should’ve gotten into that office, no matter what it took. But it was a mistake already committed, irreparable, so she’s never thought to try and consider what she should do after she’s gotten into the room. She stares at him, speechless with empty hands and a too empty mind. She has to do _something._

_“Caboose--”_

She can’t fucking listen to this. She _can’t._

She can’t leave Caboose here to die either.

She snatches the datapad out of his hands and breaks it against the wall, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She knows that it can’t possibly be the right answer, but it’s the only one she has.

 _“CHURCH!”_ Caboose cries out, flying to his feet.

It’s the first time anyone’s dared to say his name in front of her since she was told. She wonders if he’s going to hit her with his fists too.

He runs past her to the datapad, cradles it and cries like it’s a corpse. “I--I’m going to fix you, it’s going to be okay--”

Being ignored reminds her too much of the Director, of forcing herself through holes not the right shape over and over again in the hopes that he’d give her his attention and approval, the slightest _hint_ of the man he used to be.

And Caboose can’t fix him.

And it isn’t going to be okay.

“HE’S _DEAD,”_ she shouts, because she so desperately wants for him to attack her so she’ll have an excuse to make her body scream and drown out the emptiness in her mind that’s so loud it could be an apocalypse.

Caboose pops off the panel on the back of the datapad, muttering to himself. She can see even from here that the thing is unsalvageable.

“He’s not in the datapad, that’s just a video,” she hisses, furious. “Thinking about nothing but him and obsessing over the evidence of himself that he left behind isn’t going to bring him back. It isn’t going to fix anything! You’re just making things _worse!”_

He accidentally snaps a wire, and clumsy, heartbroken apologies fall from his lips. His tears are falling into the circuitry.

She’s trying to bait Caboose into fighting her. What’s wrong with her? The only reason she’d come inside was to try and help him. She wasn’t going to let anyone die.

Again.

After so many times.

She stands there and watches him until her aching legs make her sit down on his bed, until he gives up on trying to fix the datapad and just cries.

He could just watch the video on another device. It probably hasn’t occurred to him.

“Caboose,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

She is. She has no idea what else she could’ve done, and she had to stop him from rewinding that video because dwelling in your grief is death, but. Caboose is sitting on the floor with broken machinery in his lap and his hands, and he’s crying, sobbing, his shoulders shaking with it. She bets his chest aches with it.

“I lost Church,” he says between gulps for breath, like he misplaced him.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, the truth and a meaningless platitude in the same. Why can’t she say the right thing? Why can’t she figure out what it is? Does anyone know what to say in these situations?

“I lost him,” he says, voice just as helplessly devastated as a second ago.

She tries to swallow the growing lump in her throat. Her eyes burn. This is why she doesn’t want to talk to Caboose right now. She needs distractions. She needs to not think about this, to not let it hit her. But she can’t leave Caboose to rot and change in this room. She has to try, even if it hurts. She can force herself to do anything.

“It’s…” going to be okay. She’d thought _bullshit_ about that just a moment ago. It’s yet another meaningless platitude.

She thinks about her parents. She thinks about her mom. Practical and ruthless, kind in an understated sort of way. How she'd kick her husband's ass if she could've seen him, how she would've fixed everything without having to hand him a gun. 

“He wouldn’t want for you to do this,” she says. It’s the truth. She can only imagine Church’s concern at seeing Caboose like this. The bitchy bossiness he’d use to cover it up. The lump in her throat and the burn in her eyes grow. “He would want for you to move on and get better. He’d want for you to focus on… the important people you still have. Don’t throw it all away just because you lost one part.”

“Church is the most important,” he says.

“You’ll have to focus on absolutely everyone else still alive to come close to his worth, then.”

Caboose continues to cry, and reaches out his arms towards her. She realizes he’s asking for a hug. Instinctive fear leaps up her spine. Instant want crawls up her throat.

She can force herself to do anything, if it’s to save one of her friends.

She hugs him, and he hugs her tight enough that she feels it even through the power armor.

“Stop thinking about Church now,” she tells him.

“No,” he says.

_“Stop.”_

_“No.”_

People should want to be saved. People should cooperate. It’d make everything so much easier.

“This isn’t healthy,” she says, but he’s shaking his head, the side of his face pressed against her helmet like it’s at all comforting or comfortable.

“I’m never going to stop thinking about Church,” he says. “It makes me happy.”

Tears are still sliding down his face. “Liar.”

“Nu uh.”

“Thinking about dead people doesn’t make anyone happy.”

“I love him,” he says. Loved. He isn’t using the past tense. It’s loved now. “It’s just hard right now because he just said goodbye.”

She wonders if he said goodbye in his video to her. He knows that the both of them hate goodbyes.

She wants to scream, to run, to work until she can’t think. Caboose holds her tightly in place, shaking with tears and grief.

“It’s going to get better,” he says. “Pain goes away.”

No it doesn’t. No it doesn’t. It stays if you let it, it lingers, it spreads. Grief has to be avoided at all costs.

“Like you,” he says. “You were angry when I met you, but now you’re nice.”

She wonders how many people would describe her as nice. She wonders how many people would call her nice after seeing her rip the datapad out of Caboose’s hands and scream at him.

 _This man is a moron,_ she thinks for the hundredth time, just as disbelieving as the first time. He keeps finding ways to top himself. Carolina isn’t nice, has never been nice. She bit her kindergarten classmates for taking her crayons, and everything went downhill from there.

“That’s because I learned to stop thinking about my dead friends,” and family, “all of the time, Caboose. You have to stop.”

“You learned to stop thinking about the _sad_ parts all of the time,” he corrects her in that duh-isn’t-it-obvious confident way of his.

She sits there, stunned.

“I’ll stop thinking about the sad parts all of the time soon,” he says. “So don’t worry, Agent Carolina.”

Is _he_ consoling _her?_

“You…” she says, her voice weak. She thinks about thinking about York and her mom. Thinking about her understated kindness to draw inspiration without a second thought. He might actually have a fucking point, and the sheer size and depth of the point has her floored. “You have to stop looking at that video, Caboose. It was just a message. Just a goodbye. Just an explanation. Just closure. He didn’t mean for you to watch it over and over like this. Stop.”

Caboose is silent, and he squeezes her so tightly it feels like things are going to burst out of her. Tears, words, snot, howls of grief. Poison.

Maybe the poison is already inside of her. Maybe that's why she hurts so much. Maybe she needs to get it out.

Who better to do it with, than Caboose?

“Please,” she says, focusing on her job like always. “He wouldn’t want it.”

The Director had never once considered what Allison would have wanted.

She recognizes surrender and assent in the way Caboose crumbles against her after a long moment of wavering hesitation.

Success. Job done. Distraction used up. She doesn’t have to keep forcing herself. She can leave now. Find something else. 

She opens her mouth and the lump of emotions comes tumbling out, and the fire in her eyes leaves her in wet trails down her face. The poison flows out of her, and she feels worse in a wonderful way. Caboose keeps hugging her. 

  
  
  
She doesn’t watch the video.

  
But she doesn’t delete it either.

**Author's Note:**

> The illustration was done by the wonderful [jomeimei421!](https://jomeimei421.tumblr.com/) Check her stuff out!


End file.
